Can A Badger Defeat a Bull?

I don't have any data to support this next claim, but I'd still wager it's true: People who a) live in the Boston metro area and b) take March 18 off are probably doing so because they need to spend time with their new friends Pepto Bismol and the Toilet Bowl, recovering from the excesses of St. Patrick's Day celebrations that almost surely involved consuming green beverages that the Beer Gods never intended to be green.

I had one Guinness yesterday, at Special K's house, where she convinced me that I do, in fact, like Boiled Dinner (that's corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and carrots boiled together, for the uninitiated), and I overcame my decades-long fear of cooked cabbage. Last year, Special K also convinced me that taking the first Friday of March Madness off from work, to sit on the couch and watch basketball, was the best decision she ever made.

So this year I filed the paperwork and took a personal day from work to test her theory and possibly start a trend that will lead to the first weekend of March Madness becoming the national holiday it richly deserves to be.

In the past, people might have characterized my enthusiasm for college hoops as something akin to the enthusiasm a badger might have for chewing through the carcasses of smaller, more defenseless animals.

The above statement, in no way, should imply that I am a Wisconsin fan. I don't have feelings about Wisconsin one way or the other, even though I picked them in my bracket.

This year I haven't followed the regular season because my alma mater's record was just embarrassing. They finished in the sub-basement of the conference, a place littered with worn-out mascot heads, faded banners, unsold t-shirts, cobwebs and broken dreams.

Usually I can go with the fallback option of cheering for my grad school, but I don't know how to cope with a team that consistently gets a top 10 ranking and usually starts the NCAA tournament with a #1 seed. I just can't quite get it up for them this year.

But even if I can't enjoy the wins of my favorite teams, I can still enjoy the game, the spectacle, the David versus Goliath versus Cinderella stories, the mixed metaphors. And I can savor the losses of the teams I hate.

I complete a bracket every year-- always for love, never for money-- but this year I lacked the knowledge to complete the carefully constructed statistical analyses necessary for success. So I went another way. I went with mascots.

In some cases, I didn't know what the mascot was, so I improvised names for the ones I couldn't make out. In the first round I have a Garden Gnome defeating Weird Bird Creature. Later I picked Texas over Duke because a steer has bigger horns than a devil. Still not sure if a badger can defeat a bull in the wild.

So far, I'm doing surprisingly well. Maybe I should have played for money.